Becker’s connected with Dr. Huffman, assistant vice president of system nursing services, to discuss the health system’s Aspiring Nurse Program. The program offers student nurses up to $25,000 in cash, one-on-one mentorship and clinical rounding sites in exchange for a three-year work agreement at the 25-hospital system.
So far, 488 student nurses have joined the program, which celebrates each agreement with a signing ceremony — similar to sports — replete with WVU Medicine swag.
“There’s no other program out there just like it,” Dr. Huffman said. “The challenges that we heard from students are probably not the challenges you would hear in another part of the country. So, it was important for us to really listen to that and use that in a meaningful way to develop the program like we did.”
Through surveys and interviews, WVU Medicine leaders asked nursing students about economic instability. The system found that 63% of them regularly struggled paying for basic living expenses such as food, housing and healthcare.
About one-quarter of students in the Aspiring Nurse Program have had utility companies threaten to turn off their services, and more than 50% said if an emergency cost them $1,000 or more, they would no longer be able to afford nursing school tuition and life expenses.
“That matched what we heard from our academic partners,” Dr. Huffman said. “They’re the ones that told us, ‘We don’t think that we need a scholarship. A lot of the students have support for financial aid to go to school, but they’re a flat tire away from dropping out of school.'”
One of the program’s students is a former coal miner who has a young child. Others are people with higher education degrees that cannot transfer into a career in West Virginia, and thus are often ineligible for financial aid, Dr. Huffman said.
WVU Medicine piloted the program in 2023 at two locations: BridgeValley Community and Technical College in South Charleston, W.Va., and Camden Clark Medical Center, affiliated with West Virginia University at Parkersburg.
In the previous year, the pilot program hospitals hired 28 new graduate nurses and 14 new graduates, respectively. Now, there are 52 students actively committed to the Aspiring Nurse Program at the first school and 49 at the second.
In 2023, a $15,000 sign-on bonus was about the norm for the professional nursing market, Dr. Huffman said. At the time, the system’s chief nurse executive, Melanie Heuston, DNP, RN, approached CEO Albert Wright Jr. with a proposal to offer aspiring nurses up to $15,000 in cash as well.
They decided to increase the cap to $25,000.
“We’ve had wonderful support from our hospital presidents and CEOs, and our HR partners and our finance partners,” Dr. Huffman said. “It’s been a collaborative effort to make the program happen.”
“It’s a pretty significant investment, but we wanted to make sure that we’re not just paying for students that we were already recruiting in the past,” she said. “We’re starting to get others in the community that might not have had the opportunity to ever go to nursing school now can. That’s been a really, really great benefit of this.”
Although the program is too new to see long-term ROI, there are signs that WVU Medicine’s bet is paying off.
The program quickly scaled from two pilot sites to 24 hospitals and 23 academic partners, extending beyond West Virginia into Ohio, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia. The schools have also logged success: More seats are being filled, and the retention rate for students in WVU Medicine’s program is 93% or higher, which is much higher than historical completion rates at traditional nursing programs.
“It’s been nice to be able to see, just in a very short period of time, how some of these outcomes are moving,” Dr. Huffman said.